Cory Booker brags about his crime record.
On April 1, 2010, the City of Newark experienced its first homicide-free month in more than forty years and was recognized in July 2008 for leading the nation among large cities for reductions in shootings and murders, achieving decreases of more than 40% reductions in both categories. Radical transformation of the Newark Police Department under Mayor Booker’s leadership, together with the deployment of over 100 surveillance cameras throughout City, has led to Newark setting the nationwide pace for crime reduction. . . .Seriously? Here is the data from the FBI UCR. Newark with a population of around 279,000 went from 65 murders the year before he became mayor in 2002 to 94 murders in 2011 (the last year of complete numbers from the FBI). I will concentrate below on murders since he seems to think that is what he has most to brag about (I don't have the shooting death numbers handy, but they are undoubtedly highly correlated with overall murders in Newark).
Newark has done much worse on crime rates than either New Jersey or the rest of the US while Booker has been mayor of Newark. Murder rates have gone up 45% under his watch, while the rate for New Jersey went up 7.5% and the rate fell by 16% for the US as a whole.
These changes aren't just do to one year (raw data here and also from FBI UCR which matches).
Year Murders
1999 69
2000 58
2001 90
2002 65
2003 81
2004 84
2005 97
2006 105
2007 104
2008 67
2009 80
2010 94
2011 95
Average for four years before he was mayor: 70.5. The average since he has been mayor: 89.11. That represents an over 26% increase. It is very hard to look at this data and accept Booker's claim that he was responsible for something valuable. (Since Newark's population fell very slightly over the last decade, putting these numbers as rates would very slightly further increase the crime rate over time.)
Booker takes his accolades from one year 2008, which saw a big one time drop in murders. But even for that one year, it was still no lower than the year before he took office. What is clear here is that Booker can't really claim a crime reduction record based on the murder rate in one single year of the nine years that we have crime data under his administration.
Why has that happened? Booker may claim that he has instituted a "radical" change in the organization of the police department, but it didn't produce the benefits he claimed. One thing that surely didn't help was that Booker cut his police force, reducing it from 1,666 total law enforcement employees in 2002 to 1,209 in 2011.
I will have to look into this more, but my first approach clearly shows that Booker has mislead people on his supposedly big achievement and the opposite of what he claims is true, especially when you consider that murder and violent crimes have been falling nationwide at the same time.
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